Empress of Dorsa (The Chronicles of Dorsa)

24

Once the Terintan and the jailer locked the cage door behind her and walked away, Akella’s cell was plunged into near total darkness. There was a single lantern flickering at the end of the rough tunnel they’d led her down, but its light was so weak and distant that Akella could only make out the hand in front of her face when she stood at the iron bars that formed the front of her cell. When she moved away from the bars and towards the musty straw pallet and moth-eaten blanket against the black wall, even that light disappeared. She ended up crawling on her hands and knees, groping for the thin blanket, and then dragging it back to the iron bars again.

It wasn’t that she was afraid of the dark, she told herself. She wasn’t a child. But given the choice between a pitch black cave and the softest flicker of yellow light, she’d take the light.

Akella had heard about the dungeons beneath Port Lorsin’s palace through the rumors that circulated amongst the sailors, about the way the Empire’s Wise Men used the tools of darkness and the isolation to break the people one wouldn’t think could ever be broken. They said that Elian, for example, a Fesulian rizalt who’d earned so many tattoos that he didn’t have a single inch of skin uninked, gave away the location of the highborn Imperial girl he’d kidnapped after only a week in the palace dungeons. And they hadn’t even had to torture him. They’d just left him alone in the dark until he was ready to talk.

Well, that wasn’t going to be Akella. She sat down next to the iron bars, back against the rough cave wall behind her – because that was all her cell really was, an alcove of a cavern. She drew her knees up to her chin, draped the smelly blanket around her shoulders, then hugged her shins and rested her forehead upon her knees.

The Empress’s men had woken her from a lovely dream a few hours earlier. Akella decided she would get back to it.

Time passed. Sleep came, but only in spurts. At first there were no dreams. Finally, when the dreams did come, they were not of brothels and singing, nor even of the open sea. Akella dreamed of them, and that place – the first time she had dreamed of her lost crew and the gleaming white city that spiraled up the side of the mountain in some time.

They were coming for her, just like they had in real life, the irises of their eyes filled with flames as she ran for her life. The difference between real life and Akella’s dreams was that in her dreams they always caught her.

Akella jerked awake the moment the first sailor’s hands touched her.

She opened her eyes, but it was no use – the meager light at the end of the passageway was gone. Vertigo struck Akella, and for a moment she felt like a capsizing ship. The velvety darkness stole any sense of direction, of space. Akella couldn’t tell where her body ended and the blackness began, and for a moment, she panicked. Was she still breathing? Could she still take in air, or was it just the black, filling her lungs, suffocating her? She’d come close to drowning too many times, and this felt like drowning.

Stop it,she told herself angrily. Just stop it.

Akella squeezed legs and pressed her back against the rough cave wall behind her, just for the feeling of physical contact. It anchored her. She forced her breathing to slow, then concentrated on the sensation of each breath.

The panic subsided, its tide pulling back out.

Akella’s mind turned to the sailors she had lost two years earlier, to Adriel, the best first mate she’d ever had. The city they’d stumbled across was unlike anything she’d ever seen – and Akella thought she’d seen every part of the known world. Its white walls had shone like a lighthouse, reflecting the late afternoon sun back to them so brightly that it was almost blinding. The walls were semi-circular rings built into the mountainside, terraced like the rice paddies of Tak’u Sai.

Adriel had come up beside her. “Have you ever seen a city like that?” He’d had awe in his voice. “It’s beautiful. Do you think it’s … ?”

Do you think it’s the Kingdom of Persopos?was what he wanted to say. The place marked at the eastern edge of the old maps, its location marked with a skull to indicate either danger or abandonment.

Akella had a farscope to her eye. They were a fair distance from the city yet, but through her farscope, inhabitants moved about like busy ants.

Whatever this city was, it wasn’t abandoned. Which meant the skull stood for something else.

#

Time passed. Sleep came in spurts. With sleep came dreams; with dreams came Akella’s lost crew, chasing her through a white city as she ran for her life.

It was Adriel who caught her this time. “You left us,” he accused, grabbing both arms and then shaking her like a naughty child. “You left us here.”

“You were lost!” Akella cried. It hurt where his hands dug into her arms. “You were lost already, and there was nothing I could do. There was –”

“Nothing I could do,” Akella murmured, waking herself with the sound of her own voice.

The crossbar of the iron bars forming the front of her cell dug into her bicep where Adriel’s hand had been. She shifted away from it.

“Preyla,” Akella said to the dark. “I am your loyal servant; I have always been your loyal servant. But do you truly want me to go back to that cursed city, to lose myself there just as they were lost?”

The darkness did not reply.

Akella stretched her legs out before her. They ached, protesting as she shook the blood back into them. How long had she been sitting in the same position? Hours, at least.

She used the bars to pull herself up, and once she was on her feet, she realized she needed a toilet. When they had locked her into this cell, when there had still been light, she’d seen a tin bucket against the back wall, next to the blanket.

Reluctantly, Akella dropped to hands and knees, shuffling by inches away from the bars and in the general direction of the bucket. Something brushed against the back of her hand, crawling over her skin. She shook her hand violently, hoping whatever spider or cockroach or beetle it had been was the only one sharing her cell with her.

Once she did her business in the bucket, Akella crawled back to the bars and her musty blanket. If the light ever came back, it would come from this direction.

She hated the Empress for this. Really and truly hated her.

Time passed. Sleep came in spurts.

#

Clanging. Blinding light. Akella used her forearm to shield her watering eyes from the burning sun – only to realize it wasn’t the sun at all, just a lantern held by the jailer.

“Oi, pirate. Grub’s here.”

He set something down on the ground outside her cage, precisely far enough for her to reach if she stretched her arm through the bars as far as it would go. Then he walked away again, taking the sunlight with him.

No, don’t leave me in the dark again,Akella wanted to call after him, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t. As the light faded, she reached out for what he’d set down – half of a loaf of bread and a clay cup of water – and consumed them both greedily. She hadn’t even known how parched and hungry she’d become.

She licked the crumbs from her fingers once the bread was gone, tipped her open mouth back and turned the cup upside down, catching the last few drops of water on her outstretched tongue.

The light was back at the end of the passageway, nothing more than a tinge of yellow against an ocean of black. Nevertheless, Akella pressed her face to the bars, staring at it, willing it to stay.

She couldn’t say for how long she watched that light, only that it eventually winked out again, leaving her with a black darker than any night had ever been.

#

She must have fallen asleep at some point, because she dreamed of Adriel again, chasing her through the white city, asking why she’d abandoned them to their fate.

The light and the “Grub’s here” came at some indeterminate time later.

Then blackness. Then sleep. Sleep was her only refuge, and yet the dreams made her dread it.

#

Some hours later, a new dream came. There were still city walls in front of her, but – bless Preyla – they were the walls of Negusto, not of the white city on the mountain. Relief coursed through Akella, even though a part of her knew she was only dreaming – had only ever been dreaming.

She knew Negusto well. Out of all the Empire’s cities, it was the one she liked the most, probably because it was the least Imperial. In Negusto, it was possible to escape the long reach of the Empire entirely, to inhabit a world still run by Terintan warlords and oligarchs. It was as if the people of Negusto didn’t realize they’d lost their war for independence against the Empire decades ago, or, if they did realize it, they’d simply shrugged and resumed the same way of life they’d had for generations.

Akella stood just north of the city walls, the place where city began to give way to desert. She’d only been north of Negusto once or twice, because she tried to always keep the ocean in sight, so it was odd that her mind chose this part of the city for the setting of her dream. Ahead of her was a large and colorful tent, three donkeys and one horse hobbled outside. Two Terintan girls, each no older than eight or nine summers, sat cross-legged in the dust, playing with a toy that they passed back and forth between them.

The tent flap opened and a tinker woman appeared in the doorway, tall and striking. When she saw Akella, the woman waved her forward. The girls looked up, big brown eyes suddenly solemn. Akella waved at them instead of at the woman. She didn’t want to frighten the children.

The woman waved her forward again, and this time Akella’s feet pulled her forward, almost as though the woman was making them work instead of Akella.

Akella should have felt angry, or possibly frightened, but she felt neither.

“You’ve been hard to find,” the woman said when Akella was near enough.

Her features reminded Akella of someone, but she couldn’t say who.

“Have I?” Akella asked, tone playful.

“Come in,” said the woman. “Sit with me.”

Akella told herself she entered the tent because she wanted to, not because the woman was still compelling her feet forward.

The mid-afternoon sun was blunted by the tent’s canvas walls, but it was far from dark inside, which Akella was glad for. The woman led Akella to a low square table in the center of the tent and gestured at the cushions scattered around it. Two small cups of steaming liquid and a clay teapot took up the center of the table.

The woman settled herself on the cushions on one side of the table. Akella hesitated a moment, but she saw no immediate threat, so she sat down across from her, stretching out her legs to one side. For some reason, it felt good to stretch them, as though they’d been confined for too long.

“In Terintan cosmology,” the woman began, picking up one of the cups, “there is a god named Uncle Q’Util, god of the night sky. He is also god of trickery and deceit, the god you blame if you get lost in the desert, the god who compels hyenas to prey upon apa-apa calves. Some say he is evil, but I’d say he’s more of a mischief-maker than someone who causes pain for pain’s sake. In the old tales, Uncle Q’Util always does right, in the end. After he’s done wrong.”

“I’ve had Terintan sailors before,” Akella said. “I know who he is. But why tell me this? Only the goddess of the sea matters in our lives; your Terintan gods are just campfire stories.”

The woman smiled and shrugged, as though she could argue with Akella but deemed such a discussion a waste of time. “I’m telling you this, Rizalt Akella ock Hanyon, because you rather remind me of Uncle Q’Util. There are those who would call you a killer, a thief, and a cheat – those who would call you evil – but I believe you have a good heart.”